Gynecology Flashcards

What is Gynecology?

Gynecology is the branch of medicine concerned with the health of the female reproductive system. Often confused with obstetrics, an obstetrician deals with women that are pregnant and post-birth, for the most part, women are pregnant for only a small amount of their lifetime!

In the US, rather than in other countries, however, the two specialties are often combined. You can be a gynecologist alone but an obstetrician is both a gynecologist and an obstetrician in the US.

The Shame of Gynecology

Women today can expect to have gynecological procedures and childbirth dealt with safely and with far less pain than even our grandmothers. Sadly, all of these advances in gynecology have come at a cost and for the most part one of the people that had absolutely no choice in bearing the incredible cost that she did, was enslaved American woman, Anarcha Westcott, in the 1840’s.

The physical pain, humiliation, terror, and abject powerlessness that Anarcha felt as she was subjected to experimental gynecological surgical procedures without anesthesia, is so unimaginable that there is little point attempting to empathize. Anarcha endured up to thirty operations before her vesicovaginal and rectovaginal fistulas were repaired, as other physicians and slave girls were forced to hold her down and Dr. Marion J Sims determinedly sliced through her genitalia, through her screams.

Sim’s experimentations served him well, he made his fame and fortune and was summoned to operate on the Empress Eugenie. Sims made many breakthroughs, including his suture technique for fistulas that is still used today, which has undoubtedly saved countless lives and ended the misery of many women.

Sim’s work is steeped in more controversy still, his work is attributed to the deaths of babies and he overlooked poor sanitation in slave quarters as a cause of disease. White women were not spared as Sims performed ovariectomies for insanity, hysteria, and epilepsy as well as clitoridectimies which were ordered by Law by a husband or father, also to control hysteria and improper sexuality.

Some say, including Sims himself, that he gained consent from the enslaved women he operated on, others say, however, that he stooped another level lower than was the social norm of the day in owning slaves and performed human experimentation - thus making him a monster.  

Careers in ​Gynecology

To become a gynecologist you’ll need to take a three-year premed course, then you’ll need to take the Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT). You’ll then complete four years of medical school during which you will take overall medical courses and modules in OB and GYN. After that, there’s a three to five-year residency to complete before obtaining licensure to practice.

Gynecologists work in clinical and hospital settings delivering excellence in women's healthcare. Very few women would say they relish visiting a gynecologist so you’ll need to develop a respectful, professional, reassuring, understanding, and friendly approach to be a great OB-GYN. It’s imperative that women have regular life-saving checkups and in the US women often use their OB-GYN as their first point of contact whatever the health matter, simply because they have built a trusting relationship with their OB-GYN.

If you think you have what it takes to get through the school and deliver excellence in women's medicine then you can expect to be well-compensated. In figures published for 2018 by The Bureau of Labor Statistics, OB-GYNs are the third best-paid healthcare professionals in America with only surgeons and anesthesiologists earning more than the OB-GYN median salary which is in excess of $230,000, per year.

You can check out the career path of a gynecologist here at Study.com. Two great websites for budding OB GYNS are the American Gynecological & Obstetrical Society and The American Association of Obstetricians And Gynecologists Foundation. You can also check out this video featuring Dr. Carmen Woods Hollowell describing her career.

Learning Gynecology

As with any other area of medicine if you are studying OB-GYN you’ll be facing a mammoth amount of coursework coupled with crazy clinical rotations which might entail 24 hour shifts.

You’ll need to memorize medical terminology and heaps of medical and clinical knowledge. When time is key, medical students have found that Brainscape is a literally a career-saving tool that has allowed them to get through their studies successfully.

Brainscape allows you to learn twice as fast and remember longer which is why smart medical students use Brainscape.

Gynecology in Brainscape

Students can learn content and prepare for medical tests by using the thousands of flashcards prepared by top OB GYN professors and medical students, available to use, in Brainscape, for free.

There are also study guides in Brainscape developed in partnership with Next Step Test Preparation that are helping students across America get into med school. If you need top scores on your MCAT tests then you’ll find that Brainscape has produced the most comprehensive MCAT Science study guides according to the official AAMC outline. Brainscape has also produced unrivaled AP Biology and AP Chemistry study guides, too.  Alternatively, become a valued contributor and make your own OB GYN flashcards either for your private use or share with classmates and the Brainscape community.

Learn faster with Brainscape

Brainscape’s confidence-based repetition system known as CBR is revolutionizing learning for medical students. The unique system is a hybrid of three learning methods: Active Recall, Metacognition, and Spaced Repetition making it the most powerful learning engine tool available on the market today.

Here’s how it works: First of all the CBR system incorporates active recall. If you are a regular online learner you’ll likely have encountered this technique. Some educational tools focused on selling qualifications may concentrate on showing you answers in patterns and you’ll only recognize the right answer. With Brainscape we don’t get involved with the sale of qualifications we are concerned with learning only. In Brainscape you have to work to recall the correct answer.  It’s this process known as active recall that strengthens your neural pathways and memory trace meaning that you’ll be able to retrieve the information more effectively later.

The CBR system also uses spaced repetition in its flashcard format. This is a tried-and-tested technique of showing learners bite-sized pieces of information at regular intervals to enhance learning performance.

What makes Brainscape different is its use of metacognition to power the algorithm. In Brainscape after reviewing each flashcard you’ll spend a few seconds to consider your breadth of understanding of the flashcard’s content and leave a rating from 1-5. This information allows the algorithm to shuffle the cards with precision rather than randomness. Say for example you were studying Endometriosis and you knew the content exceptionally well you would leave a rating of 5. That flashcard will now only be shown to recap occasionally, instead, you'll spend time on cards that you need to focus on. It’s this remarkable shuffling that is allowing learners to learn twice as fast, traditional learning simply cannot achieve these results.

For medical students pushed to their limits with gruelling hospital rotations, Brainscape is proving a game-changer. Brainscape is enabling students to get through the coursework they need to and succeed in through this incredibly challenging career path.

How to get started

Getting started learning Gynecological Medicine with Brainscape is easy.

There’s loads of great content already created by top contributors so just select a deck you’d like to try from those below.  Choose from Reproductive Anatomy, Disorders of the Cervix, Amenorrhea, Developmental Biology, malignancy, Endometriosis, or Adenomyosis, for example.

You can also start creating your own personal interactive learning catalog. If you’d like to do that then just click on the “make flashcards” at the top of the page and get started now.

Whichever, you choose you are sure to find Brainscape an invaluable tool in your medical studies.

Brainscape wishes you all the best in your future studies and Gynecological career. Happy learning form the Brainscape team.